Jersey Shore: The Definition of 'Done'

We have learned many words while watching Jersey Shore, the most important sociological experiment of our time, but we still have yet to decipher the meaning of "done." After two relationships exploded, we think we finally understand it.

But we don't really at all. "Done" is a word with many definitions and it changes from person to person, but from the behavior of two different guidettes last night, we think we finally have a firmer grasp on its many permutations. Before we get to that, let's look at some of the other terms we will need in the course of our investigation.

DTF: One of the many acronyms employed by this species to confuse outsiders, this stands for "down to fuck." This refers to a girl who is liquored up enough or foolish enough to want to sleep with one of the males. Being DTF does not make one a member of the IFF, unless they get knocked up or contract an (incurable) infection.

Smash Room: It appears that there is a room in the hotel that is designated only for hooking up. How did we not know this, and how genius is it that they cram three people into two of the bedrooms so that another one can be open just for intimate couplings? It is called the "smash" room because it is intended for short romantic encounters only. While intercourse is usually referred to as "smooshing" this intimate activity is only reserved for guidos in relationships. It is full of kisses and cuddling. When a guido picks up a girl at a club, he rides her like he's a woodpecker looking for the last worm in the only tree on earth. Yes, it's more like smashing that smooshing.

Good Night: This is not a valediction one says before bed. This is a term used to describe an evening where all members of a "hunting party" end up getting laid.

Sympathetic: A word Snooki does not know.

Wisely: A word everyone knows Snooki does not know.

Sick: This is how a person feels when they learn the unfortunate truth once someone has been lying behind their back. The word is most often used when someone finds out her mate has been making out with ugly fat girls without behind honest about it. It is over accompanied by actual sickness if not at least a gagging and vomiting motion made with the hand and a lurch of the torso.

Excluded: When a guido or guidette behaves inappropriately, he or she can be cast out of group activities as punishment. What is interesting is that this term was originated by our subjects themselves and then broadcast out to the world, creating a massive paradigm shift not only in the ways that the Guidous Americus communicates with one another, but also in their behavior and social dynamics. It is the linguistic equivalent of this show speaking about itself in the third person.

Now that we know what we're talking about, let's get to the most important definition of of all: "done." It all started when Snooki and JWOWW went to a gay bar to celebrate Gay Pride weekend in Miami. If these two ladies—especially JWOWW with her fake boobs piled high in a revealing magenta top with ruffles along the bust line—went in any normal gay bar, everyone would think they are a pair of transgender women. But that's not the kind of bar they went to. No, they went to a guido gay bar. Gay guidos (or Gay-dos as they're known) are just like every other guido, except that, you know, they like members of the same gender. They look the same, they talk the same, they even dance the same.

However, it isn't acceptable for Gay-do to dance with each other at the gay bar. No, they dance with the guidettes who are there for a night of grinding without the worry of actually having to be DTF. At the end of the night, the Gay-dos behave with each other like any other males of the tribe—they circle each other suspiciously before starting a fist fight. The only difference with the Gay-dos is, once they pound the shit out of each other, they go home and...well, pound the shit out of each other. It is a very complicated and backwards courtship process, but it seems to work for this subsubculture. After all, black eyes are sexy on just about any man.

For a further explanation of gay culture, let's defer to the words of one of the world's leading queer theorists: Snooki.

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Famous for her theory that the world's lesbian rate is skyrocketing thanks to the poor treatment of women by men, Snooki, who got her PhD in gender studies and cryptozoology from Smith College, explains what gay men like. They are not attracted to vaginas, they are attracted to "assholes." In her interpretation of gay male desire, sometimes gay men want to have sex with women too, but when they do, it's only up the butt. That is the natural order of things. That is why her boyfriend, Emilio, gets so upset with her on the phone. He thinks that she went out and grinded with a bunch of Gay-dos and that she took them home and let them have a shot at the back door. This is a sexual activity Snooki told Emilio he could only engage in if he took her to Sushi Samba and paid. This he will not do.

It's not that Emilio was upset because he was likened to a gay man, in fact this happens to guidos all the time. As Snooki explains, gay guys are attracted to assholes and, since she calls Emilio an asshole, then that must mean that gay guys are attracted to him as well. The problem is that Emilio thinks that his girlfriend could still be unfaithful to him even by going to a gay club. Snooki is naturally enraged because Emilio continues to act like a drunk asshole on the phone (is this the influence of the tribe's forsaken household god, The Duck Phone?) and he should trust her enough to know that she's not hooking up with anyone at the club, gay or otherwise.

After his continued bouts of distrust, Snooki has decided that the two of them are "done." Now when Snooki decides that she is "done" with a boy, it means she will not talk about or think about that boy ever again. She has a ritual to ensure that this happens. First, she must have a breakdown in the middle of the street and shed tears in public. Once she goes through a mourning period—the equivalent of wearing black for a years—the second phase of the ritual can begin.

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Yes, all the members of the clan must be gathered together for the burning of the pictures. This is a symbolic cleansing that shows to the world that Snooki is no longer with her man. He is not to be mentioned or contacted. Once his face is engulfed in the flames of her colorful Bic, he is essentially dead to all that have gathered around—like family members huddled in their raincoats next to a soggy grave—to watch him burn. As the smoke curdles in the the center of the circle, everyone must mock and air their grievances about the person who is being exorcised from Snooki's heart. This makes it even harder for her to get back together with him, because if she does, she will also be a subject of ridicule. Also, she now knows that all her friends think her man is a chump.

There is a third phase of this process that we did not see. Once the pictures are burned, DJ Paulie Disco is given the boy's social security number. He then calls up GLAAD, the Gay-do Liberation And Antagonism Defense. For a small donation to their cause, they will use the social security number to find the man. Since the dispatched gay-dos will be attracted to the asshole, they circle him suspiciously, as they do, and they engage in a fist fight. Yes, the gay-dos beat the crap out of each him. But they do not take him home, for he is not one of them. They sprinkle him with the ash of his burned pictures and leave him lying there, a symbol of the destruction he has perpetrated on a guidette's heart.

See, Snooki knows how to do "done." For when she is done. She strips off those quotation marks around the word like they are last night's fake eyebrows and flicks and flicks and flicks (hey, they're hard to get off!) her finger and she won't entertain the idea of going back. She is D-O-N-E done.

The same is not true for Sammi, who continues to be "done" with Ronnie, a process where she breaks up with him, forgives him, breaks up with him, and forgives him over and over like the swells of nausea that accompany a bad case of food poisoning.

Now, we must talk about The Letter. This is a scheme that Snooki and JWOWW lifted from an old episode of Charles in Charge ( a sacred text to the guido) so that they can anonymously inform Sammi that Ronnie has been making out with fat chicks (who carry the harmful pink eye virus) and messing around with multiple ladies behind her back. Sammi found the letter and all hell broke loose. She showed it to Vinny and DJ Paulie Disavow, who told her that the allegations in The Letter were false. The guido code says that men must stick with men and women with women. That means the boys take Ronnie's side over Sammi's and tell her that it's not true.

And because men stick with men, one of the guys has to warn Ronnie about what is going on. Since it is such a delicate matter, Vinny does it by using a strange communication system that we have not seen before.

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They communicate through a series of mouthed words and hand gestures, like a blend of different sign language techniques that only the guidos can understand. This activity was actually honed through long nights spent in cavernous and loud nightclubs where one can hear nothing but the pounding beat on the "battlefield." They had to develop some way to impart information without ruining their voices with screaming, so they just mouth words and make charades. While usually reserved for the more popular nightclubs, this Pidgin language can also be called upon when discretion is required.

The funny thing about this situation is that the women do not stick with the women when it comes to Sammi and The Letter. Yes, Snooki and JWOWW typed it up, but they aren't strong enough to take credit for it. In fact, they lie and say that they didn't write it. For her part, JWOWW is an excellent liar. Like, she's an astonishingly good liar. It must be from all those years of telling people that her hair, nails, and boobs are actually real. Snooki is a bad liar, however she comes up with an excellent excuse: she couldn't have seen the events in question because she was blacked out that night. Because she is Snooki this is a completely reasonable excuse.

The only person who is honest is The Situation. He says that the letter has to be true and he brings up a very important tenet of the guido way of life. If something is on paper, then it has to be true. This is what they have been raised to believe and that is why JWOWW and Nicole (see, calling her anything other than Snooki just sounds wrong) wrote the letter in the first place. If they just told Sammi the news, she might not have believed it, but if they put the words on paper, they magically took on a different weight. They became true. That's why guidos hate books. Their paper is filled with so much truth that it makes the insides of their skulls itch and blood pour out their noses. That's why they can't keep books in the house. There is just too much truth.

Now that Sammi is confronted with the truth, she must confront Ronnie as well.

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Sammi says that she is "done" for real this time, but we just don't believe her. Unlike Snooki, she does not know the meaning of "done." She'll go crawling back to Ronnie once he apologizes or something. These two were so much more fun to watch when they were falling in love then when they were falling out of it, weren't they? Their courtship was full of fights and battles and intense make up smooshing. Now it's just petty squabbles and tedious drama. Even Ronnie wants Sammi to make up her mind already.

She can't accept all the blame though. Ronnie tells her that some of the things in The Letter are true, but not all of them. This is completely the wrong way to handle the situation. Ronnie either needs to deny everything and make it seem like someone is trying to wrong him (an effective strategy, since no one will take responsibility for The Letter in the first place) or own up to all of it (equally effective, because it is on paper so Sammi thinks it's true). But no, he says some of it is true, which makes Sammi think it is all factual and it makes him look like a weasel. And then, once she "breaks up" with him for the 900 millionth time, he goes and calls a girl on the phone just to rub it in her face. Jesus, Ronnie, have a bit of tact. You can't get upset with her for not making up her mind when you antagonize her like that.

So, supposedly the pair is finished for good. We'll have to wait and see what happens next week, for the story is not sadly not over. God, when will the Long Love Song of Sammi and Ronnie finally play it's final bars.

If only they could get over their squabbles as quickly as The Situation and Trash Bags, who nearly came to blows last night.

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Trash Bags, like you would expect from her moniker, is messy and lazy. She would rather spend her day talking on the phone and eating cereal than actually clean anything up. Vinny needs to come in and teach her how to be a woman, which includes a survey seminar on various cleaning techniques. But she can't clean, and this angers The Situation, the clan's house mother. Because of his advanced age, he feels like he needs to oversee all the cooking and cleaning responsibilities at the hotel.

This is really a silly, silly fight. Trash Bags was clearly wrong, and they were both too quick to anger. The best part about it is that, on top of insulting her function as a woman, The Situation also called her fat and asked her to "Please, get the fuck on a treadmill, please." A low blow, but because of that, he has to apologize. He really still thinks that Trash Bags is a fatty fatty two by four who can't get through the kitchen door to clean it, but he just wants to keep the peace in the house. Maybe Sammi and Ronnie could learn something from this.

The Situation's magnanimity must have paid off because he was rewarded with the rare hookup trifecta for himself and the members of his hunting party. He went out for an MVP night with his boys Vinny and DJ Paulie Disciple but they could only convince two women to come home with them. Both women were named Tara. Like Krystal and Tiffani, all girls named Tara are intrinsically trashy. I think that all the girls that the crew hooks up with from now on should be called "Tara."

When they got home with the two Taras, their evil forsaken household god, The Duck Phone, decided to play a little trick on them. He sent over his good friend Tara 3 (this time it's personal) and she was riding a great big giant hippopotamus. Oh, that evil Duck Phone, trying to prevent a "good night." What were our boys to do? How would each of them bag a Tara and make sure that the hippo didn't ransack their wonderful abode?

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The Situation loves to see a plan come together, and it so rarely happens for him. Usually his schemes end in heartbreak or fist fights, soiled hot tubs or blue balls, grills set aflame or sauce all over the floor. But this once, just this once, he thwarted the evil Duck Phone. He marched into that room and he tranquilized that hippo and ran off to the "Smash Room" with his prize. And that night, his men feasted. They supped on the flesh of merry maidens named Tara who had one too many Jager bombs and were in the process of seriously disappointing their mothers, who are both named Cheryl and work as school teachers in Ohio, but in different towns. As for The Situation, his Tara was the best. She was young and nubile and knew every way to please a man while hiding from the cameras under the sheets. Yes, she was the best Tara of all and in the morning (well, closer to 1:30) The Situation greeted her with a cup of water and said, "Get you're things, it's time to go." Yup, they were done. And he couldn't have been happier.